FORAGE members publish widely across a variety of disciplines and journals. This list will be updated regularly to reflect our most recent contributions.

2025

Konczal, Agata A., De Koning, Johannes H. C., … & Winkel, Georg (2025) Integrating nature and people in European forest management: what is the state of nature conservation and role of participation?. International forestry review, 27(3), 402-430.

Forest biodiversity can be retained by setting aside protected forest areas for nature conservation or by integrating conservation measures in managed forests. Societal demands towards forest ecosystem services have changed in favour of conservation ideas, and there is a move towards more participatory forest policymaking. This paper investigated the relation between participatory decision-making and forest management developments within twelve European countries. We assessed a) the development of integration and segregation of nature conservation in forest management and the wider forest landscape, and b) how different groups participate in forest-related policy and management planning. Methodologically, we combined natural and social science to explore if the link between the two could be assessed by means of a multi-expert and multi-disciplinary assessment. We concluded that, in the twelve studied territories, integration of nature conservation in forest management was the dominating paradigm, while there is a simultaneous increase in both the areas set aside for nature conservation and the felling to increment ratio. At the same time, there was a noticeable increase in the attention given to nature conservation aspects in the formulation of forest policy. However, the relationship between participation in forest policy development/implementation and integrating nature conservation into forest management was found to be complex. We proposed directions for future research in this domain.

Asselin, Jodie (2025) Troublesome Ground Farming Trees and Green Policy in Rural Ireland. University Press of Colorado.

Troublesome Ground: farming trees and green policy in rural Ireland, presents an ethnographic account of the relationship between land and Irish upland farmers in north County Cork, Ireland. Amid the colliding influences of agricultural professionalization, forestry expansion, a global environmental crisis, Asselin tells the story of challenges farmers in one region face in the conflicting worlds of program payments, shifting policy initiatives, and the joint cultural and economic requirements of farming.

Konczal, Agata A. and Asselin, Jodie (2025) Exploring the Green Frontier within Europe’s Recent Forest Initiatives. Geoforum 160.

In recent decades, there has been a global consensus on the urgent need for coordinated efforts to combat forest loss and degradation, given forests’ critical roles in climate change mitigation, biodiversity, and local economies. Major policy initiatives, including the Bonn Challenge, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and the European Green Deal, reflect this consensus. However, the development and implementation of forest policies are complex and politically charged, often addressing ’wicked’ problems with diverse actors and conflicting values. The proposed solutions—such as conservation, rewilding, certification, and forest expansion—introduce their own challenges. At the same time, there is growing concern about the commoditization and commercialization of forests, where green initiatives can exacerbate inequalities and facilitate new forms of resource accumulation. This paper introduces the concept of ’green frontiers’ as a lens to better understand patterns and consequences of this new forest dynamic in Europe. Applying critical perspectives typically used for frontier studies in the Global South to the Global North, this paper addresses a gap in literature on frontier-making in Europe while highlighting how environmental discourses are reshaping landscapes and communities, often reflecting historical patterns of dispossession and exploitation. It argues that anthropology and like-minded disciplines that rely on ethnographic and comparative methods, offer valuable perspectives for analyzing this formation of frontiers, and that a coordinated forest anthropology is particularly well suited to trace this shift within communities, as well as the common patterns across nations and regions. Read the full article here.

van Oorschot, Irene (2025) Forest Futures in the Making: Legal Infrastructures and Multispecies Speculation in Planning Climate-Adaptable Forests. Tecnoscienza Special Issue, Infrastructured Timescapes of the Anthropocene 15(2): 83-102

Forests are increasingly thought of as a crucial instrument to combat a host of climate change associated stressors and threats such as soil erosion, atmospheric CO2, and heat stress. As such, forests have become enrolled in seductive progress stories of envisioning future climate change mitigation and adaptation. In this article, I trace how these seductive visions are materialized in practices of planning and planting new forests. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with practising foresters in the Dutch National Forestry Agency, this piece tries to tell smaller, unheroic understories of new forests in the making. In so doing it creates the necessary empirical and conceptual space to attend to the way multiple temporalities become implicat-ed in the making of “forests for the future”. Tracing the agencies of legal infrastructures, the rhythms of seasonal plant life and human labor, the intrusion of climate change, and the speculations on future multispecies becoming that characterize these practices of planning and planting, this piece highlights how temporalities matter to the way we think and practice our response-abilities in times of ecological crises. Read the full article here.

2022

Konczal, Agata A. (2022) How Forests Shape our Identities – Podcast.

A. Konczal explores how forests shape our identities. Find our post here.

Asselin, Jodie (2022) Plantation politics and discourse: Forests and property in upland Ireland. Economic Anthropology. 9 (2) 336-348

This article explores the discursive, technical, and disciplinary mechanisms that frame plantation forests as the dominant model of forest expansion in upland Ireland. It is primarily through this frame that criticisms and local voices are solicited and interpreted. I argue that the dominance of the plantation model, the industry’s integration with key environmental and economic goals, and full governmental support leave little room for a case-by-case examination of the model and its consequences. Plantations have the potential to shift the nature of private property and the relationship between farmer and field. This reworking of the property relationship is a significant alteration of a central rural feature that has received limited attention owing to the hegemony of current practices. Regardless of the benefits or faults of the plantation model, the dominance of official discourse is such that richer and more contextually dependent discussions are muted. Read the full article here.

Zehmisch, Philipp (2022) “The Conservation of Anarchy: Ethnographic Reflections on Forest Policies and Resource Use”, in: Energies Beyond the State: Anarchist Political Ecology and the Liberation of Nature, edited by Jennifer Mateer, Simon Springer, Martin Locret-Collet, and Maleea Acker, Vol. 3 of the Trilogy Anarchist Political Ecology, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 143–160.

Conservation policies increasingly challenge anarchic groups living in remote, biodiverse zones. Especially in the Global South, the demand to protect the vulnerable environment is often weighed against the rights of hunting and gathering, herding or peasant peoples who have, for ages, survived by utilising available resources without usually depleting them. Anthropology, a discipline which has traditionally dealt with societies living in anarchy but often refused to name it correspondingly, can contribute to an emic understanding of this problematic. Highlighting a regional example from the Andaman Islands, this chapter analyses the potential of conservation efforts in marginal forest spaces to both impede and enable anarchy. The ethnographic representation concentrates on the Ranchis, labour migrants belonging to a large array of different Adivasi (indigenous) groups from Central India. These subaltern “hill coolies” had been contracted from 1918 onwards in order to clear the tropical rainforests, peopled by indigenous hunter-gatherers, for the once thriving timber industry and to develop the infrastructure for the settlement of diverse migrant communities from the subcontinent. Contrary to official expectations, many Ranchis dropped out of their contracts and encroached remote plots of forest land, which they had once cleared. Returning to a legacy of indigenous autonomy and autarky in their homelands, they reconstructed an anarchic lifeworld based on the principle of using locally available forest resources and on the primacy of evading the state and keeping it at a distance. This went largely unnoticed until the turn of the millennium, when Indian forest policies underwent a major paradigm shift from exploitation to conservation. A Supreme Court Order to evict all encroachers has ironically led to consolidation of the status quo, causing the Ranchis to continue living a humble, considerably decent anarchic life without, at the same time, being granted any rights on their occupied plots.